


The Life Of The World To Come

by emilyenrose



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Ancestors, BDSM, Canon ship, F/M, Sexy murderteeth
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-09-02
Updated: 2011-09-02
Packaged: 2017-10-23 09:10:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,588
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/248638
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/emilyenrose/pseuds/emilyenrose
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She's the only one who comes down to this part of the ship. Even with his feet raised off the floor by the oozing pink coils of the bindings she's taller than he is. She moves fluidly and her hair is a black wave around her body, dark like the darkest parts of the ocean are dark, yellow eyes shining like lanterns in the deep. The trident glitters in her hand. "Good evening, Helmsman," she says. Her accent exaggerates the eee sound of evening.</p><p>Then she hurts him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Life Of The World To Come

_She's the only one who comes down to this part of the ship. Even with his feet raised off the floor by the oozing pink coils of the bindings she's taller than he is. She moves fluidly and her hair is a black wave around her body, dark like the darkest parts of the ocean are dark, yellow eyes shining like lanterns in the deep. The trident glitters in her hand. "Good evening, Helmsman," she says. Her accent exaggerates the eee sound of evening._

 _Then she hurts him._  
_

"I don't want to hurt you," explains Feferi earnestly.

Sollux ducks his head and the movement dislodges a horn, which honks. He really wishes that all their conversations weren't punctuated by fucking honks. "Come off it FF, of course you want to hurt me," he grumbles.

Feferi has the same bag of murderous instincts every highblood has even if she keeps them under iron control. She'd blazed through the game leaving a trail of destruction and dismemberment in her wake; by the end even ogres ran away if they saw her coming.

"But I don't want to _hurt_ you," she protests. "And besides that's... perverted! We don't hate each other!"

"Who cares?" says Sollux. He doesn't like that they're still talking about this instead of getting on with it. Feferi always has to have a feelings jam about every last little thing.

"You're my matesprit and you're so important to me, Sollux, I want to do this right -"

The room is empty except for the two of them, so Sollux shuts her up by putting his fingers in her mouth.

Feferi's eyes go wide behind the goggles, and then she smirks around his fingers, and then she bites down very very delicately, and her razorblade teeth nick the skin. Sollux stays very very still. It doesn't take any pressure for Feferi's teeth to cut skin. They can slice through bone without much effort.

She spits his fingers out and laughs. "Careful," she says. "I could take them off."

"If you want," says Sollux diffidently.

She frowns. "I _really_ don't want to hurt you, Sollux, I mean it."

"I know," he says. "But I want you to be happy."

Her mouth turns down stubbornly at the corners.

"And I just want you to," Sollux adds grudgingly. "It's not like I didn't know I was dating a fish princess."  
_

 _He pants when she pauses. Yellow blood pools around her feet. The mark of her shark-teeth is on him everywhere that's not twisted up in the innards of the flagship, set into his cheeks, his shoulders, the sensitive insides of his upper arms. Oh fuck it hurts._

 _"I do enjoy these little tete-a-tetes of ours," she tells him, leaning on her trident and surveying the damage. He grits his teeth. "You bleed beautifully, Ψiioniic. It makes me glad I spared you."_

 _He swallows hard to get the taste of blood out of his mouth and says, "You spared me?"_

 _"I killed all the others and here you are, alive and kicking." She smirks. Her teeth are stained yellow. "Alive, anyway. How you must hate me."_

 _He starts to laugh._

 _"What?"_

 _"Is that what this is about?" he asks, his voice rasping in his throat. "You're too pathetic to hate."_

 _Her eyes flash and she stands up straight again. "You dare pity Me?" she demands, outraged._

 _"No," he says. "You're too evil to pity."_

 _The prongs of the trident are suddenly resting cool and heavy against his throat. Her snarl is deep and full of menace. He can only hang there and wait. The trident is less painful than her teeth, at least. And almost as if his friend were standing beside him, he can hear a voice: "What kind of nooksniffing assballs topsy-turvy world thinks the only two emotions are hate and pity? How incredibly unbelievably shitty does our cultural psychosis have to be?"_

 _I really wish you weren't dead, he tries to say, but there's too much pain._  
_

They sneak off to Feferi's quarters to try it. Feferi alchemizes her sarong and a necklace and comes up with a set of Colourful Ropes, which costs a lot of grist but it's not like it matters anymore. They settle down in the squiddles pile (FF is a compulsive alchemizer) and she carefully ties Sollux's hands behind his back.

"Is that too tight?" she asks. "Too loose?"

"It's fine, FF."

"You have to _promise_ to tell me -"

"Jegus, FF, don't worry about it." At the look on her face Sollux adds, "Look, I can stop you if I have to. Psychic, remember?"

"Yes!" she says. "I never forget."

She leans in and kisses him. Feferi's kisses are always a little sharp and a little sweet, and whenever they kiss Sollux remembers waking up to the first one. His life literally began with FF kissing him, and he feels like that means something. (It's a thought he's never going to share with any of those other assholes, but it's still true.)

"I'm going to -" she says when the kiss ends.

Sollux nods.

She slides her small cool hands up under his t-shirt at the back and rakes her claws down hard across his shoulderblades.

" _Fuck,_ " says Sollux.

"I'm sorry -" says Feferi.

He breathes deeply. "Do it again."  
_

 _She has torturers by the score, but she likes to hurt him herself. She's inventive and she doesn't lose interest. She asks questions, but they seem to be for form's sake. He knows that she mostly just wants to watch him bleed._

 _She often asks him about the preachings of the Signless, sometimes with a sneer, sometimes with a kind of cool fascination. Today it's the fascination. She looks right at him as she asks, "What is 'love', exactly?"_

 _He breathes for a long moment, twisting his arms against the restraints that hold them locked into the fabric of the flagship up to the elbow. All this time and he still can't help it. He'll be dead before he stops resisting._

 _"It's when you respect someone as if they were your greatest enemy," he says at last, "and still trust them as close to you as the person you pity most in the world. It's when you guard them like a pale lover, and advise them like an ashen one, and they do the same for you. It's beyond the quadrants. It's all of them and none of them. It swallows your whole heart."_

 _The weird thing is she actually seems to think about his answer. "It sounds dangerous," she says. "If you lose one person you lose everything."_

 _"It is dangerous," he answers. "You have to be brave."_

 _"Your friend did it."_

 _"He was brave."_

 _"She's still alive, you know," says Her Condesce. "She went mad. I suppose that was the love. I haven't bothered hunting her down, she's no threat now."_

 _He hangs and breathes, watching the thoughts flicker behind her golden eyes, trying not to think about the Disciple alone._

 _"Did you ever do it, Helmsman?" she demands at last. "This love... perversion."_

 _He bares his teeth at her. "Never met the right troll," he says._  
_

"Jegus, FF," pants Sollux after the most painful sloppy makeout session anyone has ever had in a pile of squiddles. He's bleeding a little.

"Are you okay?" she asks.

 _"Yes."_

She smiles and takes his hand. "That was exciting."

Something's off about her voice. He gives her a sharp look. "Are _you_ okay?"

Feferi frowns. "I don't like hurting you," she says. "But I do. I do and I don't."

"You didn't hurt me," Sollux says gruffly.

"Yes I did, Sollux!"

"No," he says, "you clawed me and it was pretty painful. You didn't hurt me."

"Oooh," Feferi says, and smiles, relieved. "That's all right then. Thank you." She rolls over, presses herself up against him, and adds, "I like it when we talk about our feelings."

"I do too," Sollux admits, in his lowest pissiest voice so that no one can accuse him of being emotionally open willingly. He puts his arm around her for good measure. The others can never know about this.

Feferi giggles at him and kisses one of his horns, the nearest she can reach.  
_

 _He loses track of how long it's been. Years. Centuries, maybe. She's keeping him alive with her touch. He never eats, he never drinks. The ship supplies his nutrients through the pink ooze that envelops him. He'll never be released - fuck, he doesn't know if he even still has legs. He's probably pure cyborg by now. Every time they fire up the flagship to full speed it rips through him like he's burning, and he used to think it would kill him, but it never has._

 _She's the only living thing he ever sees. She comes down to him... often, he thinks. It's hard to know. There's no night or day. He can't mark the time._

 _She still likes to hurt him. She almost never uses the trident any more. She sets her fangs in his flesh, or her claws, and leaves bleeding gouges behind. Sometimes it goes on for hours. Sometimes she loses interest after ten minutes._

 _Sometimes she starts talking. When she does he talks back. He's too alone not to. There are days it infuriates her into leaving him raw and bloody, and days when they have actual conversations. She probably knows as much about the Sufferer as any of the inner circle did by now. She seems interested._

 _He makes the mistake of telling her what was said about her. "He thought you were one of us, or ought to be. He said he remembered that you would be. We thought he was crazy."_

 _She growls. "He dared try to convert me when they brought him for judgment. Your impudent candyblood leader spoke to Me as if to an equal."_

 _"He never thought of it as converting people to anything. And he always said he wasn't our leader, he was our friend."_

 _"Did you 'love' him?" she asks suddenly._

 _"He loved the Disciple," he answers. It's a dodge but he doesn't like this question. Abruptly, she stands up and draws off her gloves._

 _Her talons have been recently sharpened and polished. It's a long time after she's left before he can stop whimpering._  
_

Feferi doesn't miss being the Imperial Heir. She doesn't make a big fuss about it, but Sollux knows she found it stressful.

"It was," she explains about a week into the game, "like the thing about ancestors. You know Eridan found his ancestor?"

They're in the Land of Dew and Glass, stretched side by side in the meadow under the mindbendingly weird sky, taking a break after fighting FF's third miniboss. Sollux scowls at her, reaches out with his senses, and shatters the nearest glass sculpture into a thousand tiny purple pieces.

Feferi rolls her eyes. "Yes, all right I promised not to bring up Eridan," she says, "but we were moirails for sweeps and sweeps, Sollux, that didn't stop being a thing that happened. And anyway he found his ancestor and he was really excited. He was a great naval hero, the Orphaner Dualscar."

"So?" says Sollux.

"So everyone knows that you find your ancestor and it's all meaningful and important and it _reveals_ things! But for me -" She shakes her head. "I already knew who my ancestor was and the thing is, Sollux, that she was just really horrible. I didn't want to be like her at all and I had to because there was Gl'bgolyb to think about."

"That sucks, FF," says Sollux. Feferi is the only person who inspires him to be patient about this kind of highblood bullshit.

"It _does_ ," Feferi says. "I had to make up my own ancestor."

"Did you?"

Feferi nods. "She was tough and strong but she was also _nice_. I knew she wasn't true but I felt like she ought to be." She pauses. "I never told anyone that before."

"I think it's cool," Sollux says.

"Did you ever find yours?"

"I thought it was all bullshit," Sollux says. "Lowbloods don't take that sort of thing too seriously."

"I'm sure whoever he was he was really excellent," Feferi says. "He was your ancestor, after all."

"I'd rather have a fake ancestor too," says Sollux. "Then he can be matesprits with yours. I somehow doubt the real guy had much to do with Her Condesce."

Feferi shivers. "I hope not," she says.

"Doesn't matter now anyway," he points out. "In case you missed it, the world ended. And thanks to you, neither of us was there."

Feferi giggles. "You're welcome."

"And now we get to make a new world," Sollux goes on, "a better world with no shitty ancestors, and you can be empress of that."

"I think I'd rather be president!" Feferi says.

"Whatever," says Sollux. "Not the point."

He's being a sulky dick and he knows it but she doesn't seem to notice when she leans over and kisses him.  
_

 _"It's coming," she says. "I felt it begin. The Vast Glub."_

 _"The end of the world," he replies. "Finally."_

 _She glares at him. "It'll kill you!"_

 _He does his best to shrug. It's basically impossible in his position. She makes an inarticulate noise and then spits a command word, and suddenly the oozing pink bindings untangle from his arms and legs. He collapses forwards. He can't remember how to stand. Robbed of his power, the imperial flagship begins to drift undirected, end over end through the emptiness at the edge of the galaxy._

 _Perhaps he should have been expecting it, but he's shocked when her arms come around him and she helps him to sit up. The hands he knows so agonisingly well are gentle. Her expression is furious. "I don't want you to die!" she spits._

 _"Bad luck," he says._

 _She snarls and kisses him._

 _He pushes her feebly away after a second. "Is this black or red?" he asks. "I can't tell."_

 _Her eyes widen. "You stupid -"_

 _"Oh," he says, getting it._

 _She kisses him again, clutching at his hair. He's so weak he can barely lift his arms to hold her, and he can't remember how to make his hands work. She's careless with her teeth, she's probably drawing blood. They kiss anyway. They kiss and kiss and kiss and they wait for the end of the world to arrive._

 _"What the Signless said when they brought him to me. Was it true?" she asks, breathless, between kisses. "Was there a better world? Were we all friends, and were we all happy?"_

 _"I don't know anymore," he says. He manages to make his hand move, touches the frill beneath her ear. "This is so fucked up. What are you going to do once the Glub gets here?" And kills everyone but you, he doesn't add._

 _She laughs. It echoes. "I don't know. I'm in the wrong place. I've made all the wrong calls. If I were there... I'm still Empress. I ought to be there. Even one matriorb and maybe there's a chance -"_

 _"Put me back in there," he says._

 _"What? Are you mad?"_

 _He must be, but she's the only person he's spoken to in centuries. In a better world she might have loved him, and there's no one left to know._

 _"I don't want you to spend a thousand years drifting on the edge of the galaxy," he says. "Put me back in there. I'll take you home."_


End file.
